Finch: sense of place determines how we think

Thursday

Oct 30, 2008 at 2:00 AMOct 30, 2008 at 7:56 PM

When Robert Finch crossed the Cape Cod Canal to spend his first summer here working at his roommate’s dad’s camp back in 1971 he had no idea that this landscape, this place would become the dominant influence that would inform his work and his life for the foreseeable future. Once he began to discover and explore Pleasant Bay and the surrounding area, he says he knew immediately that he wanted to live here and he’s been a resident of Cape Cod ever since.

Mary Richmond

Writer to give Lowell Lecture at Cape Cod Community College CONTRIBUTED PHOTO ALONG SHORE – Cape writer Robert Finch will speak in the Lowell Lecture series at Cape Cod Community College Nov. 5. When Robert Finch crossed the Cape Cod Canal to spend his first summer here working at his roommate’s dad’s camp back in 1971 he had no idea that this landscape, this place would become the dominant influence that would inform his work and his life for the foreseeable future. Once he began to discover and explore Pleasant Bay and the surrounding area, he says he knew immediately that he wanted to live here and he’s been a resident of Cape Cod ever since. Finch, a recent Pulitzer Prize nominee, will be giving a talk as part of the Lowell Lecture Series on Wednesday, Nov. 5, at the Tilden Arts Center at the Cape Cod Community College. Finch’s talk, titled, “When You Wish Upon a Star: An Investigation of the Origins of Human Thought in the Natural World,” will elaborate his views of how place, including the geography, natural history, human history and even the emotional and psychological aspects inherent in certain landscapes, impacts the lives and thoughts of those living there. Educated at Harvard University and Indiana University with degrees in English and non-fiction, Finch grew up outside Newark, N.J. Like many young men with literary aspirations he wrote poetry and fiction and had dreams of being a published writer but he wasn’t sure how to go about that. He had taken two natural history classes in college but had no idea he would become a nature writer. Once he landed here, he said, “I knew I wanted to write about the Cape.” Since that time he has had seven books published, though not all are about Cape Cod. His latest book, The Iambics of Newfoundland: Notes from an Unknown Shore, is about Newfoundland where he and his wife, writer Kathy Shorr, now spend their summers. Hired by the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History as its publicity person after his stint at the sailing camp, Finch met one of its founders, John Hay, and worked with many of the people who have since become the environmental movers and shakers and natural history educators across Cape Cod. In 1972 he had a radio show called “Cape Naturalist of the Air” on the Orleans radio station WVLC and around 1975 he began writing a weekly nature column for The Cape Codder. “For years I kept a journal,” he said, “and many of those articles started using material from those journals.” He says he is not an expert naturalist and considers himself more a writer of place than of nature. “I needed to write about the Cape,” he said. “I wanted to write the human history as well as the natural history. I never thought of myself as an environmental writer.” Finch said place “is one my recurrent themes. The landscape as we see it is just one moment in time which has been formed by everything that has come before, natural and man made. When we read the landscape, even an altered landscape, we are able to read the history behind it, making our understanding of it richer. Everything around us is dynamic, always changing. “I think part of our problem is this myth of stability, that what we see now is what always was and always will be. Change is the nature of life. We have to be open to this. If we are too rigid we lose our flexibility.” Finch believes that people “have a deep ambivalence toward nature. On the one hand, we know we need it. On the other hand, there’s something that makes us stand back. Life is more deeply complex than we think.” Robert Finch will give the 2008 Lowell Lecture Nov. 5 at 7 p.m. at the Cape Cod Community College’s Tilden Arts Center. Admission is free. During the evening, Finch will read passages from some of this works including selections from his Cape Cod anthology, A Place Apart (1993), created from materials he discovered in the Nickerson Archives at the college.

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